A Book That Haunts: Humor, Horror, and Trauma in the Book of Esther

Abstract

The Book of Esther has been read through the lens of multiple genres, from humor to horror to trauma. This paper will engage each of these genres to showcase how the Megillah interacts with multiple literary categories and perspectives. As conference participants will see, the Book of Esther is a haunting text, one that not only implements humor and horror in the face of ancient communal suffering, but one that also continues to haunt interpreters in its many afterlives. Indeed, the ways readers have made sense of Esther has had real life consequences. Jews, for example, have been Othered as demonic in response to the text's humor, horror, and trauma (e.g., Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler)—thus making original and later contexts difficult to untether. Esther, in short, is not just a text situated in ancient Achaemenid context but a text that has lived beyond that context, with a legacy impacting how readers relate to it and its characters. The purpose of this paper is to probe Esther's use of humor and horror in response to ancient Jewish trauma experienced in (and around) the Achaemenid world. But it also leaves room to consider a broader cross-temporal imagining—how the past impacts the present and the present impacts the past.